Silent Scream

by Karen Harper

  “Whew!” he said, lifting his feet off the desk and sitting up straight in his leather swivel chair. “What next?”

  “Yeah, but this is already here, and we ought to get in on it. Nothing like learning from the present to see the future.”

  * * *

  “There is nothing like looking at the past to see the present and future better,” Andrea Vance told Claire once they’d been introduced and everyone was seated at a round conference table with laptop stations.

  Looking at all the advanced tech gear made Claire realize the touch screen tablet she’d brought was almost primitive. Funny to be using such technology to record information on primitive people who probably didn’t even have an alphabet.

  “You come very highly recommended and trusted by my indispensable bog forewoman here,” Andrea said, and Claire noted a little smile between the two.

  Andrea had brown hair with wisps of silver worn loose around a serious face. Next to Claire’s five-feet-ten, she was short at about five-two, but she seemed tall—in command, charismatic. Her handshake was very strong, almost too strong. The former archaeology professor was sturdy looking, and her commanding voice projected well. She wore immaculate white running shoes, and Claire saw she had several spare pairs of them as well as white jeans and blouses on a rack nearby. So much white with so much bog and peat and mud? Perhaps the elements didn’t dare sully Andrea Vance.

  “I’m sorry Bradley isn’t here to meet you, but he will be tomorrow if you choose to come back and help us,” Andrea went on. “I hear you have a young family, so if we can have you for at least twenty hours a week here for starters, that will be most helpful. Flexible hours are fine, although when we uncover a new find and bring it—him or her or them—up, we really would need your presence and expertise on-site so you can view them both in situ and in the labs.”

  She glanced at Kris, then reached behind on her desk to produce a document, one with at least ten pages stapled together. “I understand you are married to a criminal lawyer who knows his way in and out of these silly clauses, but please read the privacy section carefully. I am sure you will find the hourly salary section to your liking.”

  “Yes. I understand,” Claire assured her as Andrea slid the contract toward her. Knowing she and Nick would have to go over it thoroughly, Claire slid it into her bag.

  “I found it ironic,” Andrea said with a nod, “that you discovered that local shallow grave that made all the newscasts several months ago, when we had you on our radar to help us examine these graves. Kris and I saw it as a sort of sign you would be perfect to help with our exhumations here.”

  A young woman came in with coffee and doughnuts, each one frosted with vanilla icing and decorated with a chocolate BB on it, no less, but Claire could sense Kris and Andrea were in a hurry to take her on the tour of Black Bog. She nearly burned her mouth on the coffee, but its temperature didn’t seem to bother Andrea or Kris a bit.

  “First, let me give you an idea of what we are speaking of here when we say bog bodies,” Andrea said, standing after they finished their food. She gestured them through a door in the corner behind her desk, a door Claire had not noticed, but then Nick had a private back “escape door” as he called it in his office. Criminal lawyers always had enemies as well as friends by the nature of their careers.

  They walked into a room that reminded Claire of a bunker. Under stark ceiling lights, surrounded by gray concrete walls, she saw wide filing cabinets with drawers lining both sides of the long narrow room. The metal file drawers were labeled with things like Young Man with Tooth Gap, Woman with Broken Wrist, Woman with Medicine in Stomach. The drawers seemed to stretch on and on, maybe thirty at least, some with no labels.

  “My!” was all Claire managed.

  “Each drawer is climate controlled and infused with nitrogen for preservation,” Andrea said.

  She pulled out the Woman with Medicine drawer, and there lay a leathery-looking corpse with totally recognizable arthritic hands with each swollen knuckle visible. Claire’s eyes widened and she sucked in a breath.

  The facial features looked skewed and a bit smashed, but the face—even eyelashes—were visible. The head had hair that stuck out from a flat round cap made of some sort of plant, maybe palm tree fiber. For one moment, Claire’s thoughts flashed to opening the freezer, to seeing the female body there, though, thank heavens, this ancient woman’s eyes and mouth were closed. But for millennia she had been frowning as if in consternation or pain.

  Claire had to struggle to find her voice. Her gaze was riveted to the body, nearly naked but for a sort of apron that curved around her knees she had bent up to her chest in fetal fashion. “Medicine in her stomach? But—”

  “Oh, yes,” Andrea said. “We always check the contents of the stomach for clues of diet, location, illness. She had quickly chewed—not well—elderberries and willow bark, which contain some of the same alleviants as are in our aspirin today.”

  “The thing is,” Kris spoke for the first time in a while, “we’ve found that in quite a few of them—as if they are drugging themselves, hoping to head off pain for something—or preparing for some terrible rite or ritual.”

  Claire’s head snapped up and around toward her friend. “Not such as being buried alive?” she asked. “Those stakes and that crude rope with her. Was she—staked down?”

  “I told you, Andrea,” Kris said, “Claire will help to solve crimes. She’s worth the training and the salary.”

  “Then let’s show her the pièce de résistance,” Andrea said, without answering her question either. She turned toward Claire with an avid look in her clear brown eyes as she slowly closed the drawer. “I refer to the brains of the Black Bog people, like those in the Windover cemetery up near Titusville. We remove, study and store their brains in a freezer, which later will be more completely examined and maybe someday, somehow—probed and, well, the results uploaded to our database.”

  Claire nodded, trying to take in each new bombshell. But it was the word “freezer” that made her own brain ache.

  * * *

  “So how was school today, Lex?” Jace asked his daughter as he drove her home from school Tuesday afternoon.

  He picked her up that one day each week for some sort of adventure or treat. He also took her on occasional weekend jaunts. The school knew their schedule, but he still went inside to pick her up in the office. A good precautionary practice, he figured, since his daughter had been abducted, and by someone posing as him. Once he and Brit were married and he had better than a bachelor pad, it was agreed he’d have her for longer periods sometimes.

  “School was good. When I told Miss Gerald my dad was going to marry a lady who works at a zoo, she said not to tell everybody right now so they get all excited, but maybe we can take a visit there someday. Her favorite animal is butterflies, but she likes all kinds.”

  “Great,” he said, wishing they weren’t behind one of the big yellow Collier County school buses, since it would make frequent stops. “Brit will be excited about that, and she’ll understand why it has to be a secret for now. Don’t want to get kids so excited they can’t pay attention in school.”

  “I think there are too many secrets around here.”

  “Really? I thought you liked secrets.”

  “Well, if they don’t take Mommy away into the swamp with bodies.”

  “Whoa! What? Your mother is certainly not going into any swamp with bodies.”

  “I heard so—buried ones you dig up.”

  “No, honey. You’re just mixing that up with something that happened earlier and turned out bad, but now everything is okay.”

  “Well, when I went to the bathroom at home I heard them talking, her and that arch lady, Kris Kane.”

  “Kristen Kane? Your mother’s old friend, the archaeologist? I thought she was living in Europe.”

  As Lexi chattere
d on about Mommy’s friend from the old days when Mommy went to school, then veered into the names of her own best friends, Jace’s mind spun back. He remembered that Kris, who had fixed him up with Claire, had a problem recalling faces. She’d told him once with his blond hair, blue eyes and muscular physique that he should have been a Viking from the days of yore. That’s how she’d said she remembered who he was—“the Viking guy from the days of yore that used to sail in their dragon ships.” Funny, how over the years when he flew fighter jets in combat over desert sands or the big passenger 747s over the Pacific, he’d sometimes thought of that.

  “So, Daddy, did you have a good day? You always ask me, so I should ask you too. And I know we will both have really good days when you marry Brit, and I get to be a flower girl at your wedding, ’cause I’m good at that after doing it when Mommy married Nick and Nita married Bronco.”

  “Yeah, honey, I had a good day flying my little airplane and spraying crops,” he said with a sigh. But he didn’t tell her that he and his pilot friend Mitch were considering something in addition to that undercover gig for the government, something far more dangerous but damned exciting. It was in his blood, his fictional Viking blood, but he hadn’t told Brit yet.

  He was almost scared to before the wedding, or she might just call it off. She didn’t even like the fact that some of the local drug smugglers he helped to get arrested might want to shut him down. It had happened in Tennessee where a drug dealing cartel had brought down a Stingray plane like his with a drone, and the pilot had burned to death in the wreckage. But yeah, maybe there were a lot of secrets around here, because no way was he telling Brit about a pilot’s death or even what his challenging new career could mean.

  5

  Andrea Vance led Claire and Kris into another back room, a smaller one this time. It was evidently a lab with large electron microscopes and other instruments Claire could not name. Several suitcase-sized silver metal freezers sat on a tile countertop.

  Misty, icy air wafted out of the state-of-the-art freezer Andrea opened. Claire stepped back as Andrea pulled out a plastic tray, placed it carefully on the counter and removed its lid. Within were four small divided compartments, each holding a single gray-brown shrunken brain next to a laminated white card labeled with neat printing.

  “These are the brains of the first four inhabitants we excavated from Black Bog,” Andrea said, her voice almost reverent. “If only we could learn what once passed through these convoluted lobes.” She paused a moment, then went on, “After removing these for study and preservation, we put the top of the skulls back on and pull up any skin, replacing any hair we can. Some of the heads have plant fiber hats we can replace. Textiles come out great at first but then shrivel, even if kept wet. With the textiles, we can use polymer coating to keep them looking fresh but not with the brains. Since their brains do not speak to us, we need you, Claire, to examine what is buried with the bodies as well as the inhabitants’ body language. In short, we need you to pick the brains without psyching them out.”

  “I’m amazed they are only as large as baseballs, though they remind me more of big walnuts,” Claire marveled, looking even closer at them. There was a faint odor, something like formaldehyde.

  “Shrunk over the centuries to about one fourth their size,” Andrea said. “Their DNA is intact, however. But, as I said, perhaps you can glean some of their thoughts and memories, just as you would with a living—or newly deceased—person from observation of their bodies and, in this case, burials.”

  Kris put in, “Perhaps someday, some brilliant techie will find a way to extract what is in there. For now that’s where you come in, though we can contribute some hypotheses too. Let’s go out to the burial site—ritual site, accident site, execution site—it may be all of the above.”

  “Yes, let’s go on out to the bog,” Andrea said, recapping the tray and replacing it in the freezer where Claire saw two other trays of ancient brains were stored. With a nod and intense stare at Claire, she added, “Yes, we need your expertise, your intuition, your opinions and judgments to go beyond what archaeology and science can surmise or prove, and that is a great deal. We’ll just give you a glimpse of our work today, but I must tell you there are some puzzling and strange burials here in Black Bog, and we are totally dedicated to getting answers one way or the other.”

  * * *

  “Detective Jensen’s not the only one who needs more answers from you,” Nick told Dale as they drove from the sheriff’s office back toward the law office after Dale had been interrogated a second time. “At least they didn’t detain or arrest you, but that search warrant for your house and office—taking your electronics too—when they’ve already fine-tooth combed your mother’s house means you are definitely a prime person of interest.”

  “I know—I know!” Dale said, raking his hands through his hair. “But do you think for one minute that a trained criminal lawyer—even one in his twenties—would be stupid enough to put someone he murdered—someone he was linked to—in his mother’s freezer right next door to his own house? I’m not crazy or suicidal!”

  The usually calm, stoic man generally kept his hair neatly upswept with some kind of gel product and was careful about his looks and clothes. But since getting in the passenger seat, he had raked his hair into clumps and had dried gel all over his hands and now his trousers.

  “So, let me ask a question they didn’t,” Nick said, not willing to back off until he had more answers. He had the worst feeling a clock was ticking, that time was of the essence. “You told both me and Jensen that you last saw Cyndi alive over two weeks ago.”

  “That’s right. So?”

  “So—have you ever seen that old Alfred Hitchcock movie, Psycho? Or the Bates Motel TV series?”

  “Nick, nobody got slashed in the shower, and I’m not some nutcase who dresses like my dead mother to kill an attractive woman so her son doesn’t go after her!”

  “Granted. But three weeks ago your mother was still alive. Still in her house. Could your mother have resented Cyndi, the woman you were enamored with, sleeping with, as you admitted to Detective Jensen? You said your mother had dementia and didn’t like Cyndi. Your mother is so recently deceased that the timeline would work.”

  “You go for the jugular, don’t you? You’re supposed to be helping me, not incriminating an old woman I recently buried!”

  “Yeah, I go for the jugular,” he said, hitting the brakes for a red light and lots of traffic. “How do you think I got so many of my clients off on murder one charges? You damn well know your defense team, if it comes to that, will need to cover every possibility that will pop into Jensen’s or the prosecutor’s devious brains.”

  “I know, I know!” he said, putting his head in his hands and messing up his hair even more. “And now they used that warrant to search my place, my office, my online history, even though I’ve got nothing to hide except a few gambling debts at the Seminole Casino.”

  “Which might have made a fiancée angry with you, and an argument ensued, things got physical—an accident occurred and you didn’t know how to hide a body fast.”

  “Hell, Nick! Whose side are you on?”

  “I’ve just learned to think like the enemy—psych them out.”

  “Wish you’d leave that to your wife. Well, not really,” he added with such a huge sigh it seemed to deflate him. “Nick, I’ve seen you interrogate others, but lay off! I wanted to go into law to help the accused, not be the accused. But Cyndi—it’s horrible that someone killed her, and I don’t know why, let alone who. Like I told Jensen, I really cared for her, even though I knew we wouldn’t work out. And what I and my defense team—if it comes to that—need to do, is figure out not only who hated her, but who wanted to set me up as—as her possible killer.”

  “We may have to shake the trees for other persons of interest. Look, we’ll go in the back way at the firm in case the media is stil
l hanging around. Duck down when we pull in. Why don’t you phone Bronco at the front desk to be sure we’ll have a clear path to get upstairs? You get back in your office, see if the tech team took anything other than your laptop. Then brainstorm for every—I said every, including your mother’s—possible motive people might have for harming Cynthia Lindley and then having the nerve and access to put her in that freezer. I don’t know why the ME’s cause of death report is taking so long, but it has to be imminent.”

  “Maybe it’s taking so long,” Dale said, his voice shaky, “for that very reason, that she was frozen in death.”

  * * *

  Claire stared out at the grid of planks that neatly dissected the part of Black Bog the team was digging in today. Andrea said, “Kris, tell her what you can at this point. I need to talk to the dig team. Be right back.”

  Claire asked Kris, “‘Everything you can at this point’ means until I sign the contract and can actually get close to one of these digs—graves?”

  “I told you this is all top secret. So, anyway,” she said, pointing, “what do you think of the site at first glance?”

  “This setting seems like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. Remember how I told you my mother used to read to us all the time after my dad deserted us and she became a recluse? The dark water and peat here, the sun creeping through the heavy foliage over that ancient, open grave...”

  “Better stick with calling it a dig site. I’ve got to admit I feel that way too, if I stand back objectively—which I seldom do. Wetlands archaeology, this site especially, reminds me of those terrifying Dead Marshes from the Lord of the Rings books and movies. But, the thing is, my friend,” she said, putting a hand on Claire’s shoulder as they walked on the boardwalk that stretched out over the bog, “you just have to shut that out. We need to bring these ancient people back to life, so to speak. We can usually discover cause of death, but we need you to weigh in on what they might have been like in life. You can’t question them, but you can observe and theorize. Now watch where you step on the planks, and if you come back tomorrow as part of the team, I’ll show you the latest excavations and exhumations up close.